Student Workshop Preparation

Please check back here frequently for updated preparatory material.

Pulsar Background Information

Living Review: Binary and Millisecond Pulsars by Duncan Lorimer
Living Review: Testing General Relativity with Pulsar Timing by Ingrid Stairs
Jodrell Bank Tutorial on Radio Pulsars

Pulsar Searching

Here’s a brief writeup created for the Pulsar Search Collaboratory. It gives some information about finding pulsars and an overview of the PRESTO pulsar searching software

Searching for and Identifying Pulsars

Pulsar Timing

An introduction to psrchive , from the 2010 IPTA student week
An introduction to tempo2 , from the 2010 IPTA student week

Basic Unix skills

If you’re not using some sort of unix now (Linux / OSX / Solaris) you will be soon. Many of the tasks you will perform during the practicum sessions will require some familiarity with unix command-line tools. While it may seem arcane at first you will soon discover that it can make many of your day to day astronomy tasks easier. Here’s a good place to start:

Introduction to Unix